With all of the hype that entered this year's Winter X Games in regards to snocross, it turned out that it was a Snowmobile Freestyler that would bring home a medal for Team AMSOIL.On Friday night, AMSOIL snocross riders DJ Eckstrom and Shaun Crapo put their Polaris sleds on the starting line for a chance at the Winter X Games finals. ESPN ran four heats of eight riders on Friday night, with the top two heading directly into Saturday nights finals. Eckstrom was up first and ran a strong race, but finished out of the top two with a fourth place finish. Crapo would run the third heat, but was also unable to get into the top two, finishing in third.
On Saturday, both riders would try to get one of the four final spots by running in the Last Chance Qualifier. In their heats, each would battle 10 other riders for two spots. Both riders got off to great starts in each of their respective heats, but a compression problem bogged down both sleds, side-lining both riders before the half-way mark.With both Eckstrom and Crapo out of the final, that left it up to freestyle snowmobile rider Aleksander Norgaard to bring home a Winter X medal. After running a great qualifying round, Norgaard went into Sunday night's final as the number two qualifier. That put him head-to-head in the first round with the number three qualifier. The young Swede would pull off two straight back flips to advance to the final. A strong run would mean gold and Norgaard gave it his all, finishing with a 93.66 score (out of 100). But he was up against the top qualifier, Chris Burant and Burant would pull off a 96 for the gold.
Congratulations to Norgaard and all of the AMSOIL sponsored riders at Winter X 11. Check out video of Norgaard in action here on ESPN.
See you at the races,
Jeremy Meyer
AMSOIL Race Coordinator
